Jenny Lewis' third solo album is overflowing with sunshine melodies and breezy
harmonies, says Neil McCormick

It feels like Jenny Lewis should be a lot more famous than she actually is. On the face of it she’s got it all: a gorgeous, top-drawer singer-songwriter with a fluid vocal tone, who makes slick American pop-rock as accomplished as anything by Sheryl Crow or Taylor Swift, but with a sharp tang of her own. She has been putting out quite brilliant work since the late Nineties, attracting some famous fans. Bob Dylan regularly featured her songs on his Theme Town Radio Hour and she has sung with Elvis Costello, with whose highbrow lyrical acuity and flowing melodic structure her own songs stand comparison.

Voyager is her third solo album, and follows 2010’s I’m Having Fun Now, which she recorded with her partner, singer-songwriter Johnathan Rice. At 38, she is long overdue a big hit and Voyager furnishes her with plenty of ammunition, from the cheeky hooks of Just One of the Guys to the chiming-guitar charm of The New You. Produced by the great Ryan Adamsat his most disciplined, it taps into a golden seam of Seventies Californian pop-rock, overflowing with sunshine melodies and breezy harmonies, guitar solos ringing out through clever songs with catchy choruses.

This is golden FM radio terrain given a distinctive flavour by Lewis’s throwaway vocal style. She never seems to break sweat, even as she digs for nuggets of wisdom in the darkest spaces of her life, chipping away at flawed relationships and ambiguous childhood memories. I wonder if it is this that discomforts the mass market, the sense of something unpalatable lurking beneath the alluring surface, and the deadpan way Lewis skates over hazardous terrain?

In terms of both themes and the way she addresses them, she is a very adult writer. She casts an almost forensic eye over love and desire in long-term relationships, examining her own sexuality and investigating the consequences of freedom in a liberal age. In One of the Boys she portrays a broody single woman uncertain about her choices, while in Slippery Slopes and Love U Forever couples turn a blind eye to each other’s transgressions in pursuit of unattainable relationship ideals. The lush, soulful She’s Not Me is likea lost Carole King classic, a soft-rock ballad of hurt and yearning for the one that got away, broken up with an unexpected confession that the relationship was destroyed by her own infidelity.